A General Point

It seems obvious enough to me that liberals have no real reason to feel warmly about either Ron Paul or Mike Huckabee. Neither man is someone who would make a good President of the United States and neither man is someone who shares my values in any serious way.

That said, I do think liberals have pretty good reason to at least cheer them on a bit from the sidelines as their success represents the flying apart of the conservative coalition that’s been dominating American politics for decades. Ronald Reagan wielded a truly formidable political coalition that reached from the Deep South all across the West and into the suburbs of New Jersey and Illinois. George Bush has presided over a much-diminished version of that coalition — a political bloc that left little margin for error. And then he proceeded to presided over a great deal of error — massive, enormous errors — that’s left the Republican Party looking adrift and meandering and has evidently sent large segments of the conservative base to start taking a rose-colored view of these two kookie political figures and their fringy opinions.

The conservative establishment is now flailing wildly to regain control and I’m almost certain they’ll ultimately succeed in delivering the nomination to an establishment-approved figure. But the movement as a whole is clearly sputtering and sick and the better the outsider candidates do the more it frays.